Biography

Justin Cammy is a literary and cultural historian with research and teaching interests in Yiddish literature, Eastern European Jewish history, and Zionism and contemporary Israel. He holds a doctorate in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from Harvard University and a bachelor's in Middle Eastern studies from McGill University. Cammy is a member of the programs in Jewish studies, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern studies, and is adjunct associate professor and graduate faculty in German studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He also serves as co-director of STRIDE (Student Research in Departments) and director of Jewish studies at Smith.

Cammy's publications range from essays on Yiddish literary history to scholarly translations of Yiddish literature to critical introductions to new editions of works by Yiddish writers and memoirists. He is in the final stages of completing a book on Young Vilna, the last Yiddish literary group in interwar Poland, and an English edition of Abraham Sutzkever’s Vilna Ghetto, one of the earliest Yiddish Holocaust memoirs to describe the destruction of a Jewish city.

Cammy is a regular visiting faculty member at Naomi Prawer Kadar summer Yiddish program at Tel Aviv University and the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. In recent years he has served as translation fellow at the Yiddish Book Center (2018); research fellow at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (2014); Webb Family Visiting Scholar at the Goldreich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Tel Aviv University (2013–14); and Mellon Senior Scholar on the Holocaust and visiting professor of English at UCLA (2009).